“He was killing himself; unfortunately, he was killing everybody else on board, and he did it deliberately,” Larry Vance, a former senior investigator with the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, said.

Shah somehow managed to cut all communication systems and then dip in and out of Malaysian and Thai airspace and eventually went over his own hometown, Penang, Boeing 777 pilot and instructor Simon Hardy said.

“It did the job because we know, as a fact, that the military did not come and intercept the aircraft,” Hardy said, adding that he…